I built a WordPress AI chatbot where the free tier isn't a trial. Here's the design story.

This is a design story about a plugin I built, not a review of it. I want to be upfront about that, because the most useful parts here are the decisions and the tradeoffs, and those only mean something if you know they come from the person who made the calls. The plugin is Rapls AI Chatbot, a free WordPress plugin that drops a chatbot on your site and answers visitor questions from your own content. I'll get to what it does, but the part worth your time is why it's shaped the way it is....